Drone4 Agro is a dedicated platform to develop a drone for use in the agricultural sector. Its goal is to have a fully certified drone of 150kg that can be used in precision agriculture and more general tasks in agriculture, like crop sampling, herds watering, etc..

Advantages: environmentally friendly, enabling beneficial intercropping, avoiding tractor trail surface loss and soil compaction, and available 24/7. It also allows the use of intercropping, thereby reducing risks of monoculture vulnerability of disease and plagues. Our drone is a flying tractor with robot features. It can carry different implements to a 100 kg with some 20 min flight time with batteries, extendable to 1.5 hrs with a range extender. It is the flying working horse for precision agriculture.

The use of planes in agriculture is quite old and goes back to the early days of aviation. However as environmental pressures to reduce the spillage of dusting chemicals grew, the typical crop dusting was less and less accepted in a number of countries. Today there are low cost alternatives that can be used: large drones of 100 kg payload that can be automatically programmed to do the crop dusting without the risk of spillage of the chemicals outside the boarders of the fields. Moreover these drones with sensors and intelligence can spray according to the needs of the crop in the field: only where severe pest incidence is, the application will be given.

We from Drone4 Agro want to develop a certified drone for such applications over the next 3 years!

Part of this effort of developing a commercial drone is supported by the EU in a EFRO project.